Tag Archives: owens

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Owens Valley

Ranch and Morning Fog, Owens Valley

October 12, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

As is often the case, there is a story behind this photograph – an image that I think is fairly atypical of my work, at least as to the subject.

A year ago, almost to the day, I was also in the eastern Sierra to photograph aspens. And on that day I got up very early at my lodging in Mammoth and headed out before sunrise, which it was still dark actually, without a fixed idea of where or what I was going to photograph. I reached highway 395 and headed south, with a vague idea of heading up one of the promising canyons such as that of McGee or perhaps Rock Creek. But very soon I saw fog out in Owens Valley above Crowley Lake and I started thinking of instead heading away from the Sierra and out into that Valley. I ended up at a small pond from which I photographed the light from the rising sun as it hit the eastern slopes of the Sierra.

That show was over fairly quickly, so I decided to explore a bit. I had noticed mist and fog in various places in the surrounding area. Some of it seemed to come from small hot springs while in other places it seemed to extensive for that. I picked, more or less randomly, some gravel roads that headed toward the foggy areas and ended up on Hot Creek, where I made several photographs of and through the fog rising from the water.

Fast forward to this year. The first day of aspen shooting was productive, but the colors were overall not really as spectacular as I had hoped. If the intended subject “isn’t happening,” I’ll often change course and look for something else. So, once again I woke up without an aspen photography plan, but with two other vague ideas in mind. One was to go up to Minaret Summit and photograph the first light on the Minarets and Ritter and Banner Peaks. The other was to drive south again on 395 to see what would happen. When I got in my car to head out I still literally did not know where I would go. I sat in the car a moment and then, for reasons that I can’t recall, picked the 395 option. (Later I realized that the other option could have been productive, too.) I headed south on 395 and was astonished to see – again! – the fog over Crowley and the mist rising out in Owens Valley. So I went to my little lake to shoot there first and then headed out to where I had shot Hot Creek last year, but this time I kept going. At one point I passed this small range while heading out but couldn’t see a shot. Later on my return trip I passed it again, and this time I saw the stock grazing in the frozen meadow next to this small creek, with mist and fog rising everywhere. I stopped.

(By the way, this is a color photograph…)

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Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: White Mountains

Owens Valley Sky

August 27, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dramatic thunderstorms begin to build above Owens Valley, flanked by the White Mountains and the eastern Sierra Nevada range.

If there is any good news about starting to run out of space on my hard drive, it might be that it encourages me to begin the process of reviewing my tens of thousands of archived raw image files, and that leads me to look through files that I haven’t revisited in a long time – and during this process I find photographs that I had forgotten about. Not only is it worthwhile to rediscover these photographs that ended up buried in the archive, but it is also a chance to recall some of the trips on which the photographs were made.

This photograph is yet another (of many!) that wouldn’t have happened at all if it were not for a whole unpredictable series of events and circumstances. I’ll make the story as short as I can, but it is still a bit involved. Almost every summer I share a long pack trip with a group of my friends. In 2005 we had come up with a 14-day trip along a good portion of the John Muir Trail between roughly the Ediza Lake area and Bishop Pass, which included one of the very few sections of the JMT that I had not hiked. We started at Agnew Meadow, headed up past Shadow Lake, turned south on the JMT, stopped at Reds Meadow, continued on to the Duck and Purple Lakes area… where I started to feel like I might be coming down with some sort of bug. Discretion being the better part of valor and all that, I decided that the prudent thing was to bail out of the trip and exit to Mammoth Lakes since the idea of getting sick on the fourth day of a 14-day hike with a large group was not appealing.

So I hiked out. Ironically, once I crossed the pass to head down to the Mammoth area, I recovered – but it was now too late to rejoin my group since they would be two days ahead of me on the trail at this point. Since I was back at my car now and feeling just fine I figured that I might as well do something else before heading home, so I decided to drive up into the White Mountains and visit the Bristlecone Pine forest. On the way back down from the Whites I just happened to pull out at this spot where the high desert terrain was extra green around a creek, on an afternoon when monsoon conditions were leading to a buildup of afternoon clouds above the Sierra, the Whites, and Owens Valley between the two ranges.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

McGee Canyon and Mount Morgan

December 10, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Snow crested Mount Morgan rises above McGee Canyon and the sagebrush-covered hills of Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

I’ve been traveling to the Sierra for many years. My first recollection of the range is a faint mental image of a shoreline park at Lake Tahoe when my family moved to California – I was four years old. My next memory is of staying at a small motel in El Portal next to the high water of the Merced River back in the days before the current mega-hotels were erected. One thing that all of my early Sierra experiences had in common is that I always approached the range from the west since I lived (and still live) in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the person whose orientation to the range is from the west, the Sierras are a range that begins almost imperceptibly in the Central Valley. Although you can see distant peaks from the Valley on clear days, it is hard to say where the range begins. As you head east you encounter some very small and rounded hills which gradually get larger. Eventually you are going up more than up and down as you travel through oak and grass lands. At some point the road rises into forest, but the mountain tops are mostly rounded and forest covered. Keep going and a few rocky prominences begin to appear along the ridges and some distant granite peaks become visible. Only after a lot of driving do you find yourself in the higher reaches of the range, and this only in the few areas where roads cross from west to east. In most places you cannot even see the summit of the range close up from the west without walking a long ways.

It was only many years later that I first went over the summit of the range and saw it from the east side. The Sierra is (are?) completely different when approached this way. Instead of a long, gradual, and relatively gentle rise to high valleys and forests and meadows, the eastern escarpment of the Sierra rises abruptly – one might say violently – and directly, in most places, from the high desert sagebrush country of Owens Valley and similar places. This wall of peaks seems almost inaccessible, and I imagine that many people who only drive past on highway 395 must regard it that way.

This photograph was made from a spot just a mile or two east of highway 395, out an a gravel road that I know. I have photographed this shadowed foreground ridge and the peaks beyond in the past, so I had a fairly good idea of what I would find at this location before I made the photograph on an early October morning when fall storms had dusted the highest peaks with snow. I used a somewhat long lens and tight framing to emphasize the rise from the foreground desert to the very high peaks beyond.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Mount Morrison and Desert Hills, Morning

December 9, 2010 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early morning light on sagebrush covered Owens Valley hills and the Sierra crest near Mount Morrison.

I was out in this section of Owens Valley early on this October morning, initially to photograph at a small lake further out in the valley. However, knowing parts of this area pretty well from past visits, I wanted to try a photograph that included the foreground tree-covered ridge in morning light with the Sierra peaks in the background – so I headed back on a gravel road that travels a bit north of the paved road I had taken earlier in the morning. I found this scene with the early light illuminating the crest of the Sierra and the sagebrush-covered foreground hills, but with morning shadows still lying across the lower eastern face of the Sierra just south of Convict Lake.

The dusting of early season snow was left over from a week of early autumn storms. Mt. Morrison is the huge and impressive summit at the right end of the ridge. Mt. Baldwin is the small but very high summit near the left end. In between is a vertical rock face that appears to be split by a crack – I think it is called “the Great White Fang.”

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: owens

Ranch and Morning Fog, Owens Valley

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McGee Canyon and Mount Morgan

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Mount Morrison and Desert Hills, Morning

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.